Tools, Dials & unexpected Levers

Month: October 2017

I loved Progressive Rock. I loved Pink Floyd, King Crimson, Yes and Mike Oldfield. And, but, there’s a little special place in my heart for Genesis… Probably because of Tony Banks (the keyboard player)…

Peter Gabriel left the group in the seventies and, well, the drummer (yeah, it’s Phil Collins) had to stand up : he was the only one who could really sing. They made Trick of the Tail (1976)…

I love Ripples because I don’t understand the lyrics, because I love the fragility, the finesse of the song, because I love how the group “quits” the love song in the middle of it (go to 4’00”), to take off like a plane in the clouds of a SO ENGLISH instrumental, with a plaintive guitar, a science of “what a bass line is”, modulations, and this “we don’t really care” aspect which is a good sign of…

Whatever.

Why does it hurt so much? Is the melancholy in my youth, or in the music? Why do I always come back to these lyrics?

Ripples

Blue girls come in every size
Some are wise and some otherwise,
They got pretty blue eyes.
For an hour a man may change
For an hour her face looks strange –
Looks strange, looks strange.
Marching to the promised land
Where the honey flows and takes you by the hand,
Pulls you down on your knees,
While you’re down a pool appears.
The face in the water looks up,
And she shakes her head as if to say
That it’s the last time you’ll look like today.
Sail away, away
Ripples never come back.
Gone to the other side.
Sail away, away.
The face that launched a thousand ships
Is sinking fast, that happens you know,
The water gets below.
Seems not very long ago
Lovelier she was than any that I know.
Angels never know it’s time
To close the book and gracefully decline,
The song has found a tale.
My, what a jealous pool is she.
The face in the water looks up
She shakes her head as if to say
That the blue girls have all gone away.
Sail away, away
Ripples never come back.
They’ve gone to the other side.
Look into the pool,
Ripples never come back,
Dive to the bottom and go to the top
To see where they have gone
Oh, they’ve gone to the other side…
Sail away, away
Ripples never come back.
Gone to the other side.
Look into the pool,
The ripples never come back, come back,
Dive to the bottom and go to the top
To see where they have gone
They’ve gone to the other side

Peter Gabriel, before this, gave to their music… more weight. Firth of Fifth (1973) is haunted by something. The piano intro is great, the song is more intense, but… Go to 3’26, where they kill it into music before the middle of the track! A bass flute, a twirling piano, a clever bass… At around 6’00, the guitar tries a solo before understanding it has to let go, and fly like a swan (6’30”).

The sheep remains inside his pen

To say goodbye, I add Steve Hackett‘s solo album. He’s the flying guitarist of Genesis you heard in the two previous songs, a very special sound he had, right?… I adored this album. But ain’t it too complex for today’s ears?? If you go the the Shadow (35’00), you’ll hear a carillon. These little bells drown into this swanny guitar sound climbing in clouds of mellotron (and ah, oh, this art of bass, made in UK, John Barry like, cf Persuaders).

In his long suite of books (“In search of the lost time”), the narrator, little by little, realizes that he has to remember, that memory in important, that he has to WRITE… the book we just read.

Clever loop, right?

I’d like to add this paragraph from Wikipedia :

Gilles Deleuze believed that the focus of Proust was not memory and the past but the narrator’s learning the use of “signs” to understand and communicate ultimate reality, thereby becoming an artist. While Proust was bitterly aware of the experience of loss and exclusion—loss of loved ones, loss of affection, friendship and innocent joy, which are dramatized in the novel through recurrent jealousy, betrayal and the death of loved ones—his response to this was that the work of art can recapture the lost and thus save it from destruction, at least in our minds.

(I bolded the bolded…)

Let’s get to my point : Bloggers are Proustians.

If you consistently write and publish, it’s to be loved (that’s OK, dear), but also maybe to… remember.

To remember what? What you’ve been thinking at? What you ARE? Who you’re becoming? To remember that you like to share?

What?? You would blog because… you blog? Just because you feel you have to?

“…is characterized by his chequered costume. His role is that of a light-hearted, nimble and astute servant, often acting to thwart the plans of his master, and pursuing his own love interest, Columbina, with wit and resourcefulness”, says Wikipedia.

Yes it’s about facets, but I do think this pattern is effective to describe different levels of some personalities, from the deep to the surface.

Harlequin, Harlekeen on :

Changing

Never being sure of

Aware that things change all the time

And that people evolve and change along the day

Being curious

Being unsteady (which is “to be alive”)

Fast, Slow : Changing speed/gear in a second

Indecipherable at times

Masked. Disguised.

Being two things at the same time

Complexity as a skill

Positive

Keensharp, vivacious

Backhanded if necessery

It’s Sunday! Fall! Then pick yourself up…

Don’t be that serious, Harlequin is in you. And you know it, quick-eyed happy you!

Yeyyy you know that mottoto, “find beauty in the little things”, etc. It’s like… too easy and you wanna fight it, but you have to agree it’s a wisdom. Let’s say a lazy wisdom.

As a photographer, you can perfectly be a pro in Afghanistan’s moutains or a specialist of Amazonian’s spiders, or you can have a more normal job but post two pictures a week on Instagram taken in your kitchen, voilà.

You can read this article about The Yoknapatawpha Rule – which says that it is possible to use Faulkner’s revelation : talk about what around you, silly!

I realized a few months ago that people really like minimalism in photography. I’m sure that it’s a whole harp, from cleaned up esthetics concerns to Nordic sight-effectiveness, by way of Zen needs or just the pleasure of eyes.

So I began to post – maybe once a month – pictures about this ugly place in a landing office. Fake plants, worn out floor, lazy chosen furnitures…

I tried to keep it simple, but interesting : a sun light reflection, a blurry mood, a sharpangle view, etc…

For me it’s a way to keep focused (“What is there?”). Maybe. Or, Okey, to find beauty where there’s little.

A Structure, it can be a rule, a law, a “it’s the way things are”, a habit, a skeleton under things, an axle, a map, a followed road.

An Event is what suddenly happens, it’s life, it’s a surprise, an accident, a happiness, a present, a mishap, a disturbance, a movement, a change.

This article is an invitation. The game will be : choose your structure, and invent an event :

Where do they touch? Is it good, bad? What happens? Can an event change a structure, or entertain it? Destroy it? What then? Is a new structure needed? Is there a thirst for other events? What is a suite of events? Can a structure hide another one? What triggered the event? Another structure? Can a structure contain an inner “events invention”? Do you have to protect the structure against events? Are there Metastructures? Do a structure USE events to grow, to increase knowledge, to breathe life in? What is a mutation? What is a call for event?

Therefore, because they have a form of newness, foreign words can have a very strong power. For me, for example, the world BETRAYAL is almost diabolical. It frightens me! Betrayal. It sounds like – maybe because of Belial? – the essence of the Devil. Who we call in France : Le Diable. Brrrr…

“Spider” sounds very innocent – is it? I think of spiderman, or of a little spider, an harmless one. I wonder what it is for English speakers… The French word for this fascinating animal is ARAIGNÉE.

For a French, the word ARAIGNÉE is horrible when you examine (and hear) it. You immediately see a frightening dangerous horrible spider. You don’t laugh anymore. You feel the chill along your backbone… It’s not cute at all. At all! And, oh, sorry, it’s feminine…

This word, araignée, is like containing the essence of it all. It’s haunted. You feel the creepyness of it, just with the sound : araignée. It’s awful, complex, vicious, archetypically incomprehensible…

Have you met someone like une araignée one day? What happened? Did you survive? Did she trapcatch you? Was she haunted by death or a curse? How come you realized she was one? A web? Dead eyes? Some weird skill? What was her venom made of? Did you sicksleep, or die slowly, or lose all reason? Did she have bored slaves (like the flies on the first picture)?